Changes

After the War, Comstock moved to New York where he was shocked to see obscene material everywhere. Working off his previous reform initiatives, he engaged on in his own crusade. Purchasing obscene material and using it as evidence of a violation of an existing—albeit mostly unenforced—1865 obscenity law.

This Act designated that a special agent be is appointed by the postal service for enforcement, and Comstock was the first person to serve in this post. He held that position for some 40 years.

Through this position and through the Society for the Suppression of Vice which he created, he and his colleagues rigorously enforced the Comstock Law, making it very difficult for the late 19th and early 20th century advocates of birth control to send out birth control information.

The law many may have been intended as a measure to protect children against erotica, but it also included material about contraceptive devices, materials, or information about abortion, so it may have also been an effort to curb the rising practice of Free Love. Industrialization in the nineteenth century resulted in a vast array of medicines, devices, tonics, and medicines for women’s health. At the same time, Goodyear’s rubber vulcanization process—which allowed rubber to remain intact in heat and cold—transformed other contraceptive devices. These once haphazard prophylactics constructed from various linens, intestines, or other raw materials, contraception developed into its own systematic industry. Soon, the vulcanization process opened the door to a variety of other rubber contraceptive devices, including IUDs, diaphragms, and douching syringes.

These early, mass-produced contraceptives were available through mail order or over the counter. Catalogs circulated by B.F. Goodrich, Goodyear, Sears, Roebuck, and wholesale drug supply houses such as McKesson and Robbins advertised a full line of contraceptives from intrauterine devices to pessaries, douching syringes, sponges, and cervical caps. A company was reputable if they only sold their its products to licensed doctors and druggists.

It was in this context of heightened visibility that Comstock emerged. Notwithstanding Comstock’s best efforts, manufacturers and advertisers of abortifacients and other contraceptive devices found methods of eluding censorship—for example, putting warning labels on products that urged pregnant women not to use them because it might induce a miscarriage. By reading between the lines, women would know that this particular product could assist them with their condition.

The Comstock Act, in many ways, was a response to a number of social changes that were occurring: the expansive power of the federal government after the civil war, urbanization—more people moving to cities--, access to cheap print material, the down of photography, the rise of affordable birth control, and an influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans—who many native -born whites saw as members of distinct, and inferior races.